Westford has a claim to fame, Jackie MacMullan

Saturday

Sep 18, 2010 at 12:01 AMSep 18, 2010 at 6:16 PM

She’s co-authored two books with Celtics great Larry Bird, written a widely-acclaimed account of Basketball Coach Geno Auriemma, and won prestigious journalism awards as a writer and columnist for the Boston Globe. Yet in Westford, Jackie MacMullan is known as Jackie Boyle, wife to Michael and mother to Aly and Doug.

She lives in an unpretentious home near the town center, coaches recreational sports teams, and serves as the secretary to Westford Youth Basketball Association.

Joyce Pellino Crane

She’s co-authored two books with Celtics great Larry Bird, written a widely-acclaimed account of Basketball Coach Geno Auriemma, and won prestigious journalism awards as a writer and columnist for the Boston Globe. Yet in Westford, Jackie MacMullan is known as Jackie Boyle, wife to Michael and mother to Aly and Doug.

She lives in an unpretentious home near the town center, coaches recreational sports teams, and serves as the secretary to Westford Youth Basketball Association.

She is so private on her home turf that only an inner circle of the town’s 22,000 residents is aware the tall blonde at high school graduations and local restaurants received the Curt Gowdy Media Award, last month, from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield. The recognition is one of the highest honors given each year to a sports journalist.

“She doesn’t go around saying who she is,” said Sue Hanly, president of Westford Youth Basketball. “She just lives her life…For us, she’s Doug and Aly’s mom and Mike’s wife. But then when you hear her on TV, I’m always taken aback a little bit, and think ‘wow, she’s impressive.’”

Even if MacMullan weren’t a household name from her appearances on ESPN’s Around the Horn, as a correspondent for cable and network television, and as a regular guest on WEEI-AM radio, she’d still turn heads. Standing 5-feet, 11-inches tall, she played Division 1 basketball for the Wildcats at the University of New Hampshire in Durham.

“She has quite the presence when she goes places,” said Hanly, whose son Conor, 14, plays basketball with MacMullan’s son.

Hanly recalled being at an away game with MacMullan who was coaching a boys’ Westford Youth Basketball team. The coach from the opposing team kept telling Jackie Boyle that she looked just like Jackie MacMullan. She didn’t set him straight.

“I really am Jackie Boyle in Westford,” said MacMullan. “I’m not Jackie MacMullan. For me that was important.”

Residents who recognize her have been respectful of her privacy, she said—so much so, that she expressed doubt to a local reporter that they know her real name. They do.

“When she’s around Westford, she makes a point of introducing herself as Jackie Boyle. She never tries to play the famous person part,” said long-time friend, Julie McKenna, whose daughter Beth met Aly in kindergarten at the Nabnasset Elementary School. “I think people recognize her all the time…everyone who know s her also knows that she’s Jackie MacMullan. She’s done a really good job of balancing the two. I think she’s done that so that things are normal for her kids. She wants them to be seen as who they are and not for who their mother is.”

She and Michael, a technology executive for New York Life, moved to town in 1989. Daughter, Aly, now a freshman at a New England-based college, was born two years later, and belonged to the first sixth-grade class to attend the newly-constructed Stony Brook Middle School in 2003. Son Doug was born in 1996 and is an eight-grader at Stony Brook.

A successful career

MacMullan worked diligently in her early career, building her brand, and cementing her place in sports journalism. She joined the Globe as a reporter in 1982, covering such memorable events as the Red Sox World Series game in 1986, the Stanley Cup play-offs during the 1987-88 season, and the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. She credits Globe writers Bob Ryan, Leigh Montville, and especially the late Will McDonough with mentoring her.

In 1995 she moved to Sports Illustrated as a senior writer, covering the National Basketball Association. The move had less to do with career advancement than it did with quality of life, she said. Magazine deadlines and travel requirements can be less demanding than those of a daily newspaper. But by 2000, she realized that her son needed her more than the Sports Illustrated job would permit, so she became a stay-at-home mother for the next two years, returning in 2002 to the Boston Globe as the first female sports columnist in the newspaper’s history. MacMullan took a Globe buyout offer in 2008. Today she has a contract with ESPN to write columns for its website and to appear on camera. The agreement gives her the freedom to stay close to her family, she said.

MacMullan has co-authored four books: Bird Watching: On Playing and Coaching the Game I Love, with Larry Bird; The Rivals: The Boston Red Sox vs. the New York Yankees: An Inside History; with Bob Ryan, Dan Shaughnessy, Harvey Araton, and others; Geno: In Pursuit of Perfection, with Geno Auriemma and Diana Taurasi; and, her most recent, When the Game was Ours, with Larry Bird and Earvin “Magic” Johnson.

A committed mother

Despite her professional success, the work has always taken a backseat to motherhood.

“I’ve never missed a birthday with either child,” she said. “Their plays and their games, their teacher conferences.”

But she also credits her husband with filling in throughout their 23 years of marriage while she worked many weekends.

“He’s a great dad,” she said. “Very natural at it.”

Truth-be-told, she missed Aly’s kindergarten play at Nabnasset when she was covering an out of town Celtics game.

Somewhere in her home is a photograph of the child in a pumpkin costume taken by McKenna. Whenever it surfaces, the picture touches a chord.

“Aly always reminds me that I missed it,” MacMullan said.

From her college campus, Aly Boyle said that the kindergarten play is a running joke in the family because “it’s literally the one thing she’s ever missed.”

“Every game, every performance, every school award, it’s always been great to look up in the stands and see that she’s there,” Boyle said. “I don’t know how she does it. She arranges her whole work schedule to be there. And it’s not like she can ask the Celtics not to play that night.”

In 2005, when Doug Boyle was in second grade, he was in a Westford youth theater performance of Aladdin. Although she was traveling on assignment, MacMullan hopped a plane out of New York and flew home to see him. She did the same for Aly when her daughter was presented with a Middle School award.

“I did a lot of that,” MacMullan said. “I didn’t mind it. It was what I wanted to do. No job is more important than motherhood.”

Hall of Fame Enshrinement festivities

Both children, Michael, and her parents Fred and Margarethe MacMullan of Sarasota, Fla. attended the Enshrinement festivities at the Springfield Hall of Fame. MacMullan and Joe Tait, known as the voice of the Cleveland Cavaliers, were presented on Aug. 12 with the prestigious honor named for the late Curt Gowdy, the legendary sports broadcaster and former Hall of Fame board member and president. MacMullan is the first female reporter to receive the award in its 21-year history.

“It was the most incredible night of my professional life,” she said of the event. “It’s the highest honor for us basketball writers. Larry Bird flew in the night before. Magic Johnson was there. Charles Barkley was buying drinks for my whole family.”

“Her reputation is off the charts,” said Kip Fonsh, assistant to the curator at the Basketball Hall of Fame. “The Curt Gowdy Award is an extremely high honor in the world of basketball and journalism. Ms. McMullan is particularly noted for the book she wrote on Coach Auriemma.”

The next night, during the Enshrinement of the 1992 U.S. Olympic Basketball “Dream Team,” the family mingled with retired Golden State Warrior player and manager Chris Mullin and retired Los Angeles Laker Kareem Abdul Jabar. Retired basketball great Dennis Rodman posed for a photo with Aly, and Basketball Hall of Famer Rick Barry gave Doug shooting pointers.

“What really surprised me was the people you hear from,” MacMullan said of the well wishes she received. “Friends from town and people I didn’t know so well.”

The list included Brian Burke, president and general manager of the Toronto Maple Leafs, and Brenda Frese, coach of women’s basketball at the University of Maryland in College Park.

Why she loves Westford

She grew up in Westwood where many of her oldest and closest friends still live. This month she and eight of those friends are heading to the Grand Canyon to celebrate her 50th birthday on Oct. 7.

“That’s why I love Westford so much,” she said. “It reminds me of where all my best friends still are.”

The relationships with her closest friends in Westford were built not from professional connections, she said, but from the common bond of raising children together. She met them at Mommy and Me classes taken at the Roudenbush Community Center, local pottery classes, and through coaching youth sports.

The children formed close friendships and the mothers helped each other, providing surrogate homes for the other’s children.

As a youth basketball coach she’s been inspirational, said Hanly.

“She can speak to the kids and bring them the love of the game,” Hanly said. “That’s my philosophy, too. It’s not about winning. It’s about learning the sport. Jackie has always had the children enjoy the game of basketball.”

The mutually beneficial relationships she’s developed around town have been a rewarding part of life in Westford.

“That’s what makes a community work,” said MacMullan. “We look out for each other.”